Mind: the brain’s leaky organ

Abstract

Reviews the book, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement by Lambros Malafouris (2013). The book focuses on the topic of embodied cognition. According to the book it is a psychological condition where the mind escapes the confines and physiological limits of our 1350 cc brains. Malafouris draws upon anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s observations of a blind man and his stick. From an archaeological perspective, Malafouris suggests that the blind person’s stick could be replaced with a plethora of artefacts and innovations throughout prehistoric culture, and thus, minds have been scaffolding and interacting with materials and the processes associated with them for thousands of millennia. Malafouris proposes that this coalition of cognition and material culture ends up being a highly critical driving force in the evolution of human cognition. Malafouris proposes that human cognitive processes constitute a ‘hylonoetic field’, which might literally mean the ‘perception of matter’. Malafouris answers the question of what might be gained in archaeology and anthropology by adopting the perspective of his material engagement theory and his extended mind hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)